Silvo Research.

Methodology principles

Six rules every Silvo report holds itself to. If a study can't meet them, it doesn't ship.

AEO is roughly where SEO was in 2003 — full of confident claims, very little reproducibility, and a lot of vendors selling certainty they have not earned. The principles below are how we try to be useful in that environment instead of contributing to the noise. They are not aspirational. Every report we publish has to clear all six before it goes live, and any time we fall short the gap gets disclosed in the report itself rather than buried.

1. Test every major AI engine, not just one

   Most AEO commentary cites ChatGPT and stops. Buyers do not. We measure citation rate against ChatGPT (OpenAI Responses API), Claude (Anthropic Messages API), Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. An engine-mix table accompanies every finding because the same business often cites differently across the four.

2. Real buyer-intent queries, not branded queries

   Asking ChatGPT for a business by name is not a citation test — that's a recall test. We use queries a real prospect would type: trade plus sub-region plus qualifier. Branded queries are excluded from headline citation rate and reported separately as a recall sanity check.

3. Publish raw data alongside every finding

   Every report ships with the underlying query bank, the timestamped responses, and the parsing rules used to detect a citation. If a reader disagrees with a number, they can rerun the analysis on the same data. We treat reproducibility as a reporting standard, not a nice-to-have.

4. Quarterly reruns, not one-shot marketing pieces

   AI engines update weekly. A study run once in March is stale by June. The Trade Service Citation Index reruns every 90 days; the Visibility Report reruns annually with a quarterly delta supplement. Findings that drift more than 10 percentage points get a published correction.

5. Disclose which audits informed which findings

   Some research draws on aggregated audits run through silvo.systems/audit. When that's the case, we say so, report sample size, and disclose any consent and anonymization rules. We never name a specific business as performing badly without its written consent.

6. Author byline and dated revisions on every report

   Every report carries Logan Hoffman's byline, the date of first publication, and a revision log if findings update. Anonymous benchmarks and undated whitepapers are how the rest of the industry hides accountability. We don't.

None of this is novel as a research stance. It's how every credible empirical field operates. It's rare in marketing because marketing is mostly self-reporting, and rare in AEO specifically because the field is too new for norms to have formed. We'd rather set the bar high now than have to apologize for sloppy 2026 work in 2028.

What's already public

Research outputs available now — proof we're running the work, not promising it.

The full reports above are still in production, but the instrumentation underneath them is live today. The free audit tool runs the same citation tests we use to build the Long Island Contractor AI Visibility Report. The Citation Stack framework is the methodology spine every study runs through. The vertical playbooks are the qualitative companion to the quantitative datasets. Treat the four below as research outputs available now, not marketing pages.

• Free AEO audit tool →

  Six-pillar audit of any URL with real Core Web Vitals from Google PageSpeed Insights and a live citation snapshot from Anthropic and OpenAI. Renders in about 30 seconds, no email gate. The same instrumentation underpins our research.

• The Citation Stack framework →

  Five-layer methodology — Position, Foundation, Authority, Citations, Tracking — that every Silvo client and every published study runs through. ~16-minute read with worked Long Island examples.

• AEO for Long Island contractors playbook →

  Trade-by-trade buyer queries, schema templates, and citation tactics for HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, kitchen, and bath operators on Long Island. The vertical reference for the contractor visibility study.

• AEO for Long Island therapists playbook →

  Modality-by-modality query patterns and structured-data templates for therapy practices in Nassau, Suffolk, and the NYC metro. The vertical reference for the therapist benchmark study.

Get notified when reports publish

One email per report. Drops the day the study goes live, with the headline finding, a link to the raw dataset, and the one chart that mattered most. No drip sequence, no upsell.

Or email logansawyer108@gmail.com with the subject “research notify” and we'll add you manually.

Want your business in the next dataset?

The fastest way to surface in Silvo research is to run the free audit. It captures the same six-pillar score and live citation snapshot we use to build study cohorts, and any business that opts in gets included (with consent) in the next aggregate run.

If you'd rather talk to a human about a custom study or a private benchmark for your category, book a 30-minute scoping call.